Midnight
by Vixen of Light
Summary: Bella sighed in happiness. Eveything was just perfect...WARNING: unexpected character death, dark!fic, post-BD. Bella/Jacob, kind of...


I sighed, in bliss. My life was utterly perfect. At my side was the most glorious man any woman could ever wish for. I had a beautiful daughter, my best friend would one day be my son in law, and I knew there was no one who could make my baby happier. I was free, and life was perfect. I lay back in the bright light, knowing I was glittering and drowning in the joy of it, and closed my eyes. I felt so lethargic, even though as a vampire I should never know tiredness again. Maybe a few moments lying here...

-

"No...NO! You can't..." Jacob pushed Carlisle forcefully aside and, balling up his hands, slammed them down in Bella's fragile, distorted chest, ignoring the gushes of blood. Her limp, frail, _human_ body flopped limply under his hands. He could hear Edward keening in some strange agony, but it was nothing. Carlisle was giving up! There was time, there was a chance. He _knew_ it. He pounded her chest again, leaning his mouth down to those beautiful lips he had kissed and forcing air between them, down her poor throat, swallowing the blood – oh, irony, sick irony – just to clear her air passages. The overhead lamp burned, achingly bright, but he didn't care a jot.

"Jacob..." the doctor's voice was gentle and sorrowful, but Jacob wasn't giving up. "Come on, honey," he grunted, gritting his teeth. "Live, Bells, _live_. You can DO it." He hammered her chest now, remembering the pressure you needed in CPR to revive a stopped heart.

_You'll break ribs_, his teacher had told him, many years ago, when he'd taken the course at school. _You'll have to, to get the weight right. It's OK, better broken ribs than death, right? They'll vomit when you resuscitate. Scoop it away and keep going. _He had paused. _CPR works in less than 0.5 per cent of cases. But there's always a chance._

Edward was screaming now, screaming her name and there was rage behind it, Jacob could tell. The tiny, loathsome creature that had stol- _tried_ to steal Bella's life was dead now, at least – suffocated in the prison of the womb before Edward could get to it.

Jacob smashed his hands down again, his vision blurring through tears of panic, pain and rage.

-

_I must be getting back to Edward soon,_ Bella mused. Everything felt so light, so wonderful. Her world was utterly perfect and she was the luckiest person alive. Her body felt unchained – the heavy human flesh had given way to this airy...thinness...where had she heard such a beautiful phrase before? Poetry...from back when she was human. She had wondered how it would feel to be a creature of the night and it turned out it was as weightless and joyful as heaven. Silly Edward! She must make him understand this was perfection!

Ahhh...she doubled up for a moment as a flash of strange pain shimmered through her. That wasn't right...there was no pain in her new life. It was impossible. She fought against the edge of blackness threatening her, rejected it from her mind. There...better. Her mind was free again, and her body was floating loose from the very earth...

-

"Jacob. _Jacob."_ Carlisle placed a cold, white hand on the boy's shoulder. "I'm so...so sorry, but...she's gone. Bella..." He stopped, shook his head, stepped back. There was nothing he could say. He couldn't turn to face his son, held back by Emmett and Jasper, screaming. He half-feared he was insane. But it was worse to stay looking at the werewolf boy, sweating and begging, face streaked in Bella's blood, forcing air into her dead lungs and pounding at her chest. Esme had wrapped the aborted child in a blanket and taken it away, at least...the sight of it – _she_, for it had been a little girl, almost fully formed with, Carlisle noted, large brown eyes – had been nothing but bile and agony to everyone.

"Give her more venom! You said it works, right? That's better than..." Jacob broke off and spun round.

"Sometimes not even vampire venom is strong enough..." Carlisle whispered.

"You're a damn doctor, the best there is! _Do_ something! Fix her! If you can't..." He broke off, turning back, broken, to the...yes, the corpse...laid out, bleed out, final and empty and _dead_.

Jacob just stared, blank, for a moment, and Carlisle almost wanted to step back from the boy: invulnerable as he was, the werewolf radiated an agony and a fury beyond anything he could imagine. He turned back to the body of the dead girl and something inside him seemed to die; Carlisle almost saw his soul let loose from his body, desperate to follow Bella wherever she had gone now. All he could do was close his eyes and turn away, try to find Edward, who had been taken away from the scene by his brothers. Carlisle knew what was going to happen; what had so nearly happened before. He couldn't think of a single way his son would ever recover from this.

And neither was he alone.

-

"Bella..." Jacob leaned in to the curl of her ear. She was still warm, how could she be warm? "I will never stop loving you, Bella. Never. I won't..." He could get no further. His heart blinded by grief, he slumped to the floor beside her and outside, he could almost hear the wailing howl of the wolves, crying for him.

-

Bella could sleep. She didn't know how but she could feel it creeping up on her, just as when she'd been human. Not to sleep would be to suffer. How very, very peculiar.

_It's alright,_ she thought, dreamily. _It's OK. Everything is just as it should be. _


End file.
